T.O. on the Radio

The Shredd and Ragan Show scored Buffalo’s first one-on-one radio interview with Terrell Owens yesterday. You can listen to it here and read a brief transcript here.

The silence at the beginning is a little awkward and doesn’t kick the interview off very well, but the rest of the way, T.O. says a lot of good things.

It almost sounds like he’s ready to be a team player and carry the Bills to the playoffs. And that’s something the team has been missing the last few years–a player who’s going to keep his teammates accountable (I know, I know, it’s like watching one of those old cartoons where you know the trains are going to collide, but you can’t stop watching).

Sure he believes he does no wrong, but that’s part of the T.O. package we’re going to have to deal with for the next year. But if he’s able to help the Bills to a few more wins (and doesn’t drop as many balls as he did last season), then it’s going to be a nice, long honeymoon period.

4 Comments

You know who else drops a lot of passes? EVERY GODDAMN DEEP THREAT WR IN THE NFL outside of Larry Fitzgerald and Andre Johnson, who are just not human. Every WR who runs parallel to the pass is going to drop xnumber more passes than the Wes Welkers of the world who stay closer to the QB and run patterns perpendicular to the throw.

TO caught 88% of the catchable passes thrown his way last year. That’s more than Dwayne Bowe, a supposed stud in the making. Brandon Marshall caught 89%, Calvin Johnson 89%, Roddy White 90%, Moss 92%. If you’re a deep threat you’re going to drop a handful of passes. You’re also going to score 7-10 more TDs than the Wes Welkers of the world. (In the case of TO, only 4 players caught more TDs than him and the Bills only caught 4 more TDs combined. That’s the entire team.)

Every time a Buffalo fan repeats this (and I was guilty of it too until I actually researched it, something ESPN wouldn’t ever consider doing) you’re just playing into ESPN’s “he’s not worth it, except for pushing our agenda” agenda.

"Some Cowboys observers said Owens probably took an unfair amount of blame for the team’s 0-2 playoff record during his tenure and its underachieving 2008 season, when it went 9-7. He had his share of dropped passes (33 last season, second-most in the NFL), but he didn’t throw interceptions or play defense or call plays."http://www.buffalonews.com/sports/story/601872.html

Well, Allen Wilson is a moron. Do you realize how many dropped passes 33 would be? That’s 2 a game, every game. And someone had more than that? Why would you ever throw either of those guys the ball?

The correct number is 10. 4th worst in the league but only 3 away from being out of the top 15, for one of the top 5 WRs in the league. (By the way, Money had 8. Eight. For a RB.)

I figured that maybe Wilson was using “targeted” and subtracting from that the total number of receptions. Which honestly would make him an even bigger moron because then he’d be blaming every incompletion on the WR no matter where the QB put the ball.

But TO had 69 receptions on 140 targeted passes. Holy shit, he dropped more than half of all passes thrown to him! So he pulled that number out of his ass or at least someone else’s ass.

(Why iWon is the only site that publishes those numbers, I’ll never know. But they get their stats from STATS, Inc. so they’re legit.)